I started on squidoo six months ago and had someone in our offices with blog experience start 3 lenses on squidoo. Well she didn't know as much as she led me to believe. Well I dropped in on my lenses a while back and we had had no traffic and we ranked somewhere in Turkjeckistan, like 600,000+ on squidoo's own lenses. I optimized it, added links to our other lenses, fixed the keywords, added flickr, .......... So here is my question. Squidoo is really easy to work with but is it worth the effort to get it listed in directories, get incoming links, add it to social bookmarking...... all the usual and necessary to get it traffic, pr, etc..... OR should I just put the time on my blogs? I think the answer is put it into my blogs but does anyone see the value of putting a lot of effort into squidoo or is it sort of a place for newbies and then you graduate to blogs you create and host elsewhere?
Make sure the lens hasn't been taken down. Also make sure the lens has USEFUL content that people would actually want to look at.
The idea behind using Squidoo and hubpages instead of your own blog is that you don't have to update it (to keep a high ranking in google). An important factor in SEO is to keep your blog/site fresh. So every time Google visit your site it will find a new article. A lot of people don't have time (or money) to keep updating their blog everyday, so therefore they use Squidoo. If you use these sites you don't have to worry about this part of SEO, because a lot of people are adding their articles. Even the link building part is smaller on Squidoo, because the lenses are linking to each other.
Cool! Thanks for the insight. I am very guilty of having a blog and not adding squat for many weeks. It just kinda sits there and I really doubt I will ever have them time to add 1-2 posts per week. I do find squidoo remarkably easy to use, I like the feel of it and I understand it is do follow so I am going to keep working on it. Minor changes have resulted in small traffic increases, like 5 hits on one lense and a total of 9 hits for all three lenses. Not much but I think there is a lot I can do easily to get the lenses increased visibility.
hi not been using squiddo that long but it has need more then worth th time to put the lens up.Free ebook on this in my sig file no sign up just free short report
went to my squidoo dashboard yesterday and updated a lense I had on sex toys. I know the subject is very close to porn and no one wants that on their sites, can't really say I blame them. Thing is we carry the stuff on our lingerie site. Who would a guessed the two were compatible? Anyway when I went to publish I got a message indicating squidoo was going to freeze the lens and might, might delete my other lenses. I knew there was a reason I didn't want to place content on someone else's site. They have their own terms of service and I don't think we are in violation but their spam filter picked up some words that unleashed the message and now it will be hand reviewed. This won't effect anyone who has very mainstream stuff, but I thought I would mention is as regardless of what your content is if squidoo thinks it is spam, or you are reported by someone on squidoo you risk being removed. Just something to consider when using squidoo. I knew I should have gone into selling sweater vests like my mom suggested! Wouldn't be having these problems! Mom is always right!
you are right about that. @ OP, you cannot expect much traffic form a lens that you build just 2 days ago. your lens needs continuous promotion for it to rank high and bring you traffic
I am having to work on mine a bit but its working out pretty well for me. Much like anything else fresh content is good along with a bit of cross promotion. http://www.squidoo.com/hubble-prints Nigel
I have to agree with sachy24 on this. Lenses usually rank well in the first few days or so then disappear. You have to treat your lens like any other website in terms of trying to generate traffic to it - good content, backlinks, etc etc.
There are certain techniques that must be utilized when building and designing a lens and several promotion techniques to get traffic and rank for your lens or else nothing will really happen. Read this guide, it is the complete guide to squidoo including how to build, optimize for SEO and several promotion techniques that will get your lens noticed and traffic to it quickly: How-To Squidoo - Steps to Building the Best Lens for Website Promotion
Always start with a good keyword research and you can even use ezinearticles to hunt for the most popular keywords readers love and use them on your lens so that they will rank well on the SE. It takes time for any worthwhile endeavor, two months is perhaps a more realistic time frame than two days.
With mine, I followed the following steps. I am actually publishing an article on my blog this weekend about this: 1) submit to directories, squidoo specific directories are good too, a few are: http://www.squoogle.com/ http://isleofsquid.com/directory/ http://www.lensroll.com/ http://www.squidom.com/ http://www.lensmasterworld.com/ http://www.squidirectory.01dir.com/ 2) join groups, specific and general groups. For example, 'squidoo's biggest group' and similar, and then look for some more narrow, specific ones - so for teaching lenses, submit to 'education' groups, 'classrooms' etc. 3) Stumble, digg, propeller, magnolia, etc, etc - use the firefox shareaholic plugin. 4) link from other sites, and other lenses. 5) make friends, add people, lensroll etc. I did this with a 3 of mine and they're all on first page of google.
I thought this was the case, but I looked at the backlinks for some lenses and they don't have many links at all. How competitive are the keywords?
Hey so I am not alone in this indexing problem. I am also getting problem with squidoo indexing. And even Yahoo.com is not yet index my squidoo lens. Tough time going with this squidoo. My lens is one month and half month old. Done lots of SEO activity. I had created post on this. And also talk in SquidU forum abt it. You will find all the resource here http://yicrosoftdirectoryblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/squidoo-page-indexing-problem.html
You guys need to social bookmark your lenses and possibly write articles for them. You NEED backlinks to get traffic. I'd suggest a minimum of 15 social bookmarks, and at least 3 or 4 articles at Ezine plus a few other directories. If you can spin your articles, then all the better. Spin them and submit a new spin to each article diretory. Also, you need to update the content on your lens at least once a week, and then ping the lens after editing/republishing.